


Midas

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Fraternal Pining, Stanford Era, Voicemail
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-08
Updated: 2014-07-08
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1916670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During his years at Stanford, Sam thinks about returning Dean’s calls.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Midas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radialarch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch/gifts).



> Gift-fic for [radialarch](http://archiveofourown.org/users/radialarch), who likes Sam and sad things.

Two and a half weeks after Sam storms out of a trashy motel room, bags packed, father screaming behind him, his cellphone rings.

He’s sitting in a cramped little dorm room at Stanford, unable to sleep, and his roommate, Luis, passed out and snoring in the corner. There’s only a handful of people who would be calling him at this hour. None of them are people he wants to talk to.

Sam silences his phone and goes back to his textbook, the pages crisp and new, its spine unbroken.

\-----

Sam avoids looking at his phone the next day. Then the next, and the next. He pulls it out of his pocket and then changes his mind.

“Girlfriend?” Luis asks one afternoon.

“No,” Sam says. He pockets his phone again. “It’s nobody.”

\-----

He meets Jessica a month into the first semester.

She’s tall and golden-haired and when she smiles, Sam wants to take up photography and painting and poetry, and all that other lame shit, just so he can capture it. So he won’t forget.

She invites him over to study—“Real studying. Not—you know,” she says—and Sam hesitates before giving her his number.

Jessica writes it on her palm, holds it up for him to see and says, “Like that?”

“Perfect,” Sam says, trying to grin, trying to mean it and not let his fear show.

“Perfect,” Jessica agrees, with that smile again. Sam feels something warm and calming settle over him, something he’s been hard-pressed to find before. He likes her a lot already, and that scares the shit out of him.

\-----

They study, poring over text books and test questions. Jessica laughs easily, hair hanging in waves over her shoulder, making silly faces when he gets an answer wrong and his cheeks start to burn.

When she smiles at him, the grit and the dirt from a life on the road begins to crumble away.

\-----

Two months and one week in, Sam opens his voicemail and presses “play.”

He hears Dean’s hesitation on the other end. Miles away now, and nearly three months ago, and still Sam can picture the set of Dean’s shoulders, his awkward fidgeting, the way he shuffles from one foot to the other.

“Sam—I—” Dean swallows. “Look. I just… what Dad said, you know he—”

Sam hears Dean’s hand tighten on his phone, the plastic squeaking. He forces himself to stop the recording and delete it, and the message disappears, taking Dean’s name along with it.

\-----

Jess bakes for him one afternoon. She tells him it’s for no reason other than the fact that she “felt like it.”

She hands him a plate of sugar cookies after, warm and gooey and made from scratch. Sam wolfs down two and a half before he stops and stares at the plate in front of him, slowly realizing that his hands are shaking.

No one has ever made him cookies before. Not homemade, not by mixing ingredients in a bowl and shaping them with their hands, not with him on their mind. Dean bought—or stole—packs of quick-bake chocolate chip cookies sometimes when they rented an apartment instead of a motel room, but those always tasted a bit like plastic, a bit too fake.

“Hey,” Jess frowns at him. “You okay? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Sam says. He wipes his eyes. He’s not crying over fucking cookies. He’s _not_.

Jess doesn’t believe him, moving closer, worried. Sam doesn’t know what to do so he kisses her, lips still sugar-coated, standing with the corner of the kitchen counter digging into his hip. When he pulls away, Jess blinks at him, and Sam says, “Thank you.”

\-----

Sam thinks about calling Dean.

He doesn’t.

\-----

Jess paints him a portrait of a dog one Saturday morning while they’re having a picnic in the park, because Sam’s been watching a golden retriever play fetch for the last hour. He misses Bones, and the sound of paws on a wooden floor, the warm, heavy weight at the end of his bed as he slept.

“Maybe one day I’ll get you a real dog,” Jess says, handing him the still-wet canvas.

She takes him back home to her apartment in the afternoon when it starts to rain. She lays him down on her bed, moves over him, smears warm hands against his skin, everywhere.

Sam holds on to her like he’s drowning.

\-----

**Voicemail: Dean, 10:54pm**

Dean is drunk this time. Barely a second in to the recording and Sam can tell, like it’s in his breath pushing through the receiver, like he can smell the booze on each exhale despite Dean being miles away.

“I hope you’re happy,” Dean says. “I hope you’re having the time of your fucking life. Especially now that you’re not stuck with your stupid, piece of shit brother.”

Sam swallows. His thumb hovers over the delete button.

“I mean it, Sam,” Dean continues, quieter. “I really do. I hope you’re happy.”

\-----

Sam saves Jess’s cookies for as long as he can, needing a reminder that someone thought about him. Someone actually cares for him, and not just to tote around duffle bags full of guns, or for back-up on a particularly difficult witch-hunt that turns out to be about real witches and not just some stupid metaphor.

He nibbles on one when he studies or does his homework. When he gets home from class. When he finishes difficult tests he grabs two and heats them up in the tiny microwave, the smell of sugar filling the room.

Luis steals some, and Sam has to remind himself that punching someone in the arm for taking his food is probably not a normal reaction. Even if Sam just wants things for himself for once, and even if Luis reminds him a little too much of Dean after he’s had a few beers.

So instead Sam says, “Jerk,” and hides the rest of the cookies in his bedside table until they’re gone.

\-----

**Voicemail: Dean, 6:12pm**

\-----

**Voicemail: Dean, 8:30am**

\-----

**Voicemail: Dean, 2:09am**

\-----

“You do that a lot,” Jess says.

Sam looks at her and she nods down to his hands.

“You take out your phone, fiddle with it, then put it away again,” she says. “Waiting for a call?”

Sam thinks about lying. About telling her that it’s a bad habit, worn nerves—which, actually, is not really a lie. Not really.

“More like avoiding one,” he says.

Jess nods. She doesn’t say anything, but Sam thinks she might get it. He doesn’t have to say anything, and still, Jess just _gets it_.

\-----

Sam can’t sleep, so he listens to them.

“Busted up my right wrist trying to get this fucking poltergeist under control,” Dean says in one. “I—you would have laughed your ass off at me. Two minutes in and bam, I’m out on my ass. Dad ripped me a new one.”

“Flyin’ solo this week,” Dean says on another. “Dad thought it’d be better if we worked this one separately. Different angles, or, uh. Yeah. I guess that’s it. But I met—there was this…”

Dean trails off awkwardly. Then he says, “Yeah, well. Anyway, dude. I hope you’re learning a lot, or, y’know. Whatever.”

Dean’s drunk again in the last one.

“I’m fucked up, Sammy,” he slurs. “I’m just—fuck. I can’t do this. I’m just messed, and I’m tired of it. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up, man. If Dad—if he knew. If he knew what I’ve—where I’ve been. Who I—I don’t…”

Dean sighs. It comes out shaky and raw, a bit too guilty, a bit too ashamed. Sam ignores the tight feeling in his chest, fights the urge to hit the dial button, fights the urge to call him back and tell him that it’s okay, whatever it is.

Dean huffs out a laugh. “I just want my dorky little brother here, y’know?”

\-----

Dean doesn’t call again.

\-----

Sam passes all his exams with flying colors, and then some.

He and his friends go out for drinks and greasy bar food. Sam drags Jess away half an hour into the celebrations, the sticky floors and dim lights of the pub reminding him too much of _before_ , of living out of a trunk and hustling decent people out of their money and not knowing if he’ll even live through the next day.

Jess kisses him on a pier by the ocean. She tucks something cool and sharp into the palm of his hand.

“Just, you know. Whenever,” she shrugs. “No rush or anything.”

Sam opens his hand and stares at the key, freshly cut, still glinting against the light despite the sun setting into the water, painting the sky in dark oranges.

“Come on,” Jess leads him off the pier and into the sand.

They walk bare-foot and in silence, her shoulder bumping his, hand on his wrist, head turned towards the water lapping at the beach. On nights like these Sam lets himself think about things, about the things he wants, about where he wants to go from here. He thinks, and the sea-salt air and the warm, soft sand keeps all his fears and doubts at bay.

“I want to be a lawyer,” Sam says eventually.

Jess smiles up at him. “So do it.”

And Sam, he feels like he actually might be able to. He might be able to have this.

\-----

Sam moves into Jess’s place in August.

Sam thinks about calling Dean.

He doesn’t.

\-----

Jess tutors on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Sam plays soccer with his friends, or darts, or basketball, or whatever sport people his age are into now-a-days. Otherwise he studies, does his homework, looks up course information and classes at different law schools, reads about bar exams.

Jess cooks homemade meals. They visit the local farmer’s market on the weekend. She tries to get Sam to cook with her one night, showing him how to work the stove, when it’s time to put pasta in the pot.

Sam almost sets the damn kitchen on fire.

“Typical man,” Jess teases him.

“I have a habit of burning things,” Sam jokes. “It’s like a curse.”

He doesn’t realize what he’s said until Jess pales, staring at him with wide, sad eyes.

“It wasn’t your fault, Sam,” she says.

It’s the first time they’ve talked about it. It’s the first time since Sam told her about his mother, since sitting in a cramped pub booth with her, when he had too much to drink and the thought kept chasing its own tail inside his head.

It’s the first time he’s even thought about it in a while. It might even be the first time anyone has told him that. His father, his brother, they never told him that he wasn’t to blame. Some days he thinks he might be, because no one’s ever told him otherwise.

Jess touches his arm, smiles up at him, soft and warm.

“Let’s get pizza instead,” she says.

\-----

Sam passes his LSAT with a one seventy-four.

He doesn’t think about calling Dean.

\-----

At 1:30 in the morning, there’s a bump that jolts Sam awake.

At 1:33, he hears the sound of footsteps in the living room, quiet and careful.

This is a safe neighborhood—Jess had assured him of that, after she saw how his hands shake sometimes, when she noticed how he loses his breath sometimes and can’t always find it again.

“It’s just old couples and new families here,” she told him one night when he couldn’t sleep, her hand running through his hair, her heartbeat pressing against his ear.

Sam tip-toes out of the bedroom. The window at the end of the hall is open, letting in warm air, and the string of beads Jess put up in the doorway to the kitchen are still swinging gently back and forth.

There’s definitely someone in the apartment, someone occupying space that they aren’t welcome to, someone _breathing_. Sam sees a shadow move, a figure in the dark streaking across the window, and Sam presses against the far wall. He keeps quiet, feeling offended, almost. Offended that someone chose this building, this apartment. He’s offended and terrified and—

The figure passes him and Sam swings at them. The figure ducks, blocks, then lunges, knocking Sam onto his ass. Sam feels knees digging into his sides, hand pressing on his neck, his shoulder, pushing him into the floorboards so he can’t move. Sam struggles, kicking and trying to wriggle free, but the person just holds him down and laughs.

Sam stops moving. His blood runs cold, because he recognizes that sound.

When his eyes adjust he sees Dean beaming down at him in the moonlight from the open curtains, saying, “Easy, tiger,” and Sam feels everything come crashing down around him.

\-----

“I have to be back by Monday,” Sam tells him. “I have an interview.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Dude, I heard you the first damn time.”

\-----

The burnt husk of his apartment is still smoking behind him when Sam decides he was right after all; he does burn everything. He is cursed. Like Midas, only his touch turns everything to ash.

He feels Dean come up behind him, feels the weight of all the words Dean wants to say, the words he can’t get out. They hang heavily in the air between them. All the things Dean wants to say but can’t because they’re useless.

Sam never says anything about it, but he’s grateful. In that moment, he’s grateful that Dean’s too emotionally stunted to tell his “dorky little brother” that he’s sorry, that he never meant for this to happen.

Sam’s grateful because he doesn’t want to hear it. He doesn’t think he’ll ever want to hear it.

He closes the trunk of the Impala.

\-----

Sam never makes it to his interview.


End file.
